eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

As Frank stated, MSDN Connections (Australia) is up and running.  However, when I tried to register, it told me that I must change my country to Australia to get into it.  Well, since I don't live in Australia, I don't want to do that, so I guess for the masses, we'll have to wait until MSDN Connections is available for the US or other countries.

Tonight I ran across a small problem with the C# debugger, or rather the Command Window in VS.NET.  While stepping through my application (more to come for this) to determine where a slowness was occuring while reading the registry, I tried several different commands in the Command Window.  When doing so, I think I've found a bug in how it interprets commands.

Heres another little thing that VS.NET does that irks me.  Whenever I'm copying and pasting HTML code in the code editor, VS.NET seems to think that if I don't have a ID or Name attribute, that it should add one.  I wish the IDE could be a bit smarter to think that if I didn't have it before, I wouldn't want one now.  Also...why does the IDE think that I want a Name attribute anyways.  How often do you use that attribute...NONE!  Well, at least for me...I know it has its purposes, but I'm just complaining because the IDE isn't that smart.

Thanks for the great plug and announcement Greg!

While working on my companies new intranet, I've decided to pull some of our existing pages that are "Classic" ASP based, into the .NET realm.  In doing so, I need to gain access to our staff information from a SQL Server Database.  Since no stored procedures were ever used, and I don't have the security level to create any, I needed to build some queries that will retrieve the data I wished.

This afternoon I decided to bring my company's intranet into the .NET world.  The current setup has an XML Document with a XSLT tranformation to build the listing of hidden/visible hiearchy.  I wanted to make the move as easy as I could, so I remembered ASP.NET contained a XML Server Control that allowed you to display XML Data transformed by XSL/XSLT.  Very cool indeed, but this isn't what I'm really stoked about.

The past several days, I've been preparing my company's websites and connecting applications for our upcomming name change. I've never realized how much of a pain it is to change sites layout, colors, etc. until I had to modify a .NET application of ours we released a few months ago.  I had to manually touch, at least, 50 various .ASPX and .ASCX files to get the new look and feel to propogate throughout the entire application. Talk about a pain in the butt.

<rant>
I really wish that the default value for the GridLines property on the DataGrid (and possibly Repeater/DataList) was set to "None" and not "Both".  I mean, I can see the reason for having this if someone wanted to just plop some data on a webpage, and didn't care about formatting or defining their own columns.  But, for about 99% of the time, developers have to build the Columns manually, set styles, etc. etc. until it looks the way we want it.  I've never seen a DG in production that has GridLines, mainly because it just looks plain stupid with custom formatting.